posted
This has been floating around in my mind for a while now, but I can't seem to get it to work the way I want it too. I haven't got much more than this, but I'm not sure if I can make this beginning work, and I want to see if it's worth continuing. Any suggestions would be great. It's going to be fantasy.
It was a long line, and Eldras knew that it wouldn’t move fast. After all the years he’d served the Council, one would think that he would be granted a private audience. But the Council had no respect for their assassins. Who would? Thieves, scam artists, general public nuisances… anyone who was a regular at the city jail was trained as a Council assassin and used until they were too old and feeble-minded to be worth keeping. Then, they were disposed of, often by their younger colleagues. Eldras hated it, but he knew no other life. He had with no family to speak of and no experience in anything but theft and dishonesty. After spending his childhood in the slums, he found that assassination came easily to him. He didn’t enjoy it, but he could do it. It kept him alive, at least until something better came along.
posted
Assassins recruited from a group of thieves etc. to serve a ruling Council? What's not to like. The concept sounds great but, from your first sentence, the question that I want answered is WHY is he there to meet with the council. Then we get an info dump, all of which is probably important to the story and to his motives, but it's hard to care yet. The only other quibble I have is the rhythm of the last three sentences, too repetative. Of course that's also just opinion. Good luck with the story.
posted
I think you might be concentrating on plot setup too early in the narrative, it's a hard balance to make. There's gotta be something in the first few lines that (hopefully) jerks the reader into your world, makes him care. Once that is done the setup won't seem nearly as dry.
Not knowing the rest I don't really have any suggestions. If you're married to the structure, perhaps just using a little more verbage (ie: "A grimy man bumped Eldra's elbow from behind, complaining loudly that the line was moving too slowly.")
posted
I agree that it's kind of infodumpy. Give me more about Eldras, and weave the info in more gracefully. Maybe you could start with him doing something more active than standing in line, which would give you more opportunities to play around with who he is and what he's doing as you expose his world to us.
on the plus side, as plmorgan says, what's not to like in a story about assassins? Additionally, all the sentences work pretty well. OK, with the exception of the last one, which I think should be "it would keep him alive . . ." instead of "kept."
If you can't make the beginning work, skip it and write the rest, and come back to the beginning later. don't get so hung up on making this part perfect that you don't get the rest down.
posted
Sweet, that's kind of what I was thinking was wrong with it. I might move it down to where he gets his assignment (that's what he's waiting in line for), but then I have to find some other place to introduce another character.
This is awesome, though, that people seem to like the idea. I was a little nervous about it, myself.
Think about this for a moment. Eldras knows nothing but living by theft and dishonesty. He has now been formally trained as an assassin. What possible reason does he have for not going freelance the moment he thinks through where his life is headed? Why not make a few lucrative hits on fat targets now and outrun his fellow assassin's while he's at his peak rather than just waiting around till the Council decides to off him?
Naturally, if I were running this business, I'd have an answer that wasn't just dependent on keeping my assassins from ever thinking it over. Making them upstanding family men (under my personal patronage) comes to mind (there is a reason that the terms "Godfather" and "Family" have certain associations).
But you haven't supplied such a mechanism and it doesn't seem it would work with the story you're creating. So your character really can't be aware of something like this so explicitly at this stage of the story.
There is another plausibility problem that is related to the entire scene. You don't have your assassins stand in a public line for an audience to recieve their assignments. Any assassin stupid enough to do it isn't worth the cheap tin knife you gave him, let alone any kind of training or pay. Any person so stupid that you could successfully assassinate them after your assassin stood around in public for several hours openly waiting to meet you is not worth assassinating.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of assassins, but I also like to be persuaded that the person in question would actually be able to assassinate someone at some point in the story.
posted
This is one of those situations where I'm perfectly willing to offer a critique but I feel that my input is largely a regurgitation of what has gone before. But I would really like to be helpful, so if this is redundant I apologise.
I agree with the other posts that there is too much information that is too general to pull me in. The overall concept probably needs a bit of clarification, but what you have here sounds more like your own notes on background than like an actual story excerpt.
My advice would be to "zoom in" so to speak. Start pretty narrowly with Eldras' direct impressions; perhaps that he's shifting his feet back and forth to ease the discomfort of standing in one place . . . maybe he can be "practising" his skills, so to speak, by imagining the different ways he could kill all the people ahead of him in line so he wouldn't have to wait as long . . . etc. Something of that nature would reveal his assassin status, and the lowly place in society it had, better than spelling it out with description. And the closer you zoom into Eldras' mind, the easier it would be for me to identify with him, especially if my senses are engaged.
As it stands, I feel like a very outside observer, and disconnected from Eldras. Bring me closer.
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